That's the problem. They're run by unqualified, unexperienced hacks who play at economics and got the position because they greased the right palms during election campaigns.
There may be economists in the civil service but their advice is generally ignored in the chase for votes.
Almost all crashes are caused by driver error and most of the rest are down to substandard maintenance with a vanishingly small number caused by odd things like signal failure due to lightning strikes.
A train which can keep an eye on where it's going AND record/report track conditions in realtime would significantly improve the current setup where inspection trains only run over a track at weekly/monthly intervals.
On the UK's Docklands light railway, there is no driver, merely a supervisor - whose job is to open/close the doors and tell the train it can start. They often sit up the front even though there's no need to, as passengers reportedly feel uncomfortable when they realise there's no human in charge. (Although having observed them I suspect it's more about self-justification than anything else)
"Weekend drives through the mountains, coastal roads and countryside? I'll take the wheel, thanks."
You might like to let the car drive. That way you can pay attention to all the scenery the passengers are cooing over instead of concentrating on not driving off the next hairpin bend.
Self driving trains exist and have done for a long time, but they don't cope well with unexpected obstructions on the line (like, for example people jumping in front of them or trees being down). That's to be expected when they're powered by tech as ancient as a PDP11 (Seriously, every train on the UK Dockland light rail system has one on board)
Quite a bit of automotive automation might end up being fed back into rail automation.
Even a H2 engine emits carbon - almost all the H2 fuel currently produced comes from stripping methane.
Clean burning it is, clean to make it isn't.
There are only a few real ways of reducing net carbon emissions without killing off 90% of the global population and reverting to a sackcloth+ashes existence. Just about everything that's been done so far has been greenwash to try and put off making significant changes.
General aviation has a safety record on par with motorcycle riding.
Helicoptors, cropdusting, bush flying and others tend to be below that, with military flying coming dead last - which is one reason why military pilots are no longer the go-to guys for airlines - they tend to take risks and press on where a civilly trained pilot will call it quits and divert.
Allowing them to resign means they can keep their pensions.
The same thing happens in the United Kingdom and people are getting pretty sick of it. There may be legal reforms on the horizon though.
As for all the "there are plenty of good cops out there" - the answer is "not nearly enough of them. 'Good cops' who cover for bad cops are bad cops too"
"If you think the people who hire cops don't bother to check with previous employers and do Google searches on new applicants, you need your head examined."
It's quite clear that in a large number of cases this is exactly what doesn't happen.
The issue of forged or "duress" glowing references is pandemic, but compounded by privacy breach litigation against former employers who've warned someone off hiring someone when references are followed up.
This is why many former employers simply say "XYZ was employed from date A to date B", no matter what the actual employment history is and refuse to divulge anything more.
Police cameras only work well when there are _severe_ disciplinary penalties for failing to activate one, or selectively deactivating it.
I've lost track of the number of reports I've seen where cruiser dashcams failed to operate at inconvenient moments. This is why modern systems are tamper-resistant and that in turn is helping expose more bent cops.
"There is no reason passenger lines can't go everywhere, too."
Economics.
The same reason that a bus is a great way of moving a lot of people, but a scheduled bus service is a lousy way of moving lots of people, except under very specific circumstances.
"99% of Brits do not have that kind of convenient access to a HSR station,"
Nor do they have that kind of convenient access to an airport.
Factoid:
In the time it takes me to leave my London doorstep, drive to the airport, check in, wait, fly to Paris, jump on a metro and get to my hotel, I could have been in the hotel for at least an hour had I taken the train - and it's a 100 minute commuter journey to the Eurostar station from my doorstep.
Even getting to Amsterdam by train takes the same time as flying and the train trip is significantly longer as it has to route around the north sea.
"Of course this did not include cover night and low-light times like cloudy days or when the sun is not 90 degrees to the panel"
Or take into account the 50% loss in capacity as the panels age - with newer generation low cost panels apparently having as low as a 6 year lifespan vs the 15-20 of older ones.
As for "ecosystems which would benefit from some shade" - they've been doing without it for thousands of years thankyouverymuch. Just because you think they might benefit doesn't mean that the organisms there will see it that way.
"Oh - someone thinks there isn't already networks in place or is thinking in terms of water with upstream and downstream pipes."
Or someone doesn't realise that grid distribution systems designed to handle a few large power sources and feedouts has trouble coping with uncontrolled, unreliable input from thousands of small sources with resultant net power flows _across_ the infrastructure instead of up/down it.
Redoing the geometry of the grid system to cope with the rapid, uncontrolled, undesigned rearrangement of energy sources is pretty much on par with starting over - and it's a cost which the "renewables" generators don't have to take into account because of their heavily subsidised feedin tarriffs.
If solar and wind were worthwhile then the big generators would be using it. In some cases they are but the smaller sites are mostly subsidy suckers, not power generators.
"The gotcha is in shutting down the reactor, which can take longer to bring up than a coal plant -- which takes 1/2 day instead of several days."
That depends on the reactor design.
The 7MW experiemntal MSR at Oak ridge was shut down every friday afternoon and brought up every monday morning because noone wanted to look after it over weekends.
MSRs can be throttled up/down so quickly that the need for conventional peaking plant is almost eliminated and they don't suffer from Xenon poisoning.
Once you've got a reactor that flexible, you no longer need solar/wind generators - or the backing plants needed to guarantee them (you could use a MSR as backing plant, but what's the point?)
"One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid."
Most modern designs have passive safety mechanisms. Positive action is not needed to lift control rods into place (they drop in) and cooling systems are gravity fed.
One of the critical design features of all recent-build plants is the ability to passively cool the reactor system for the entire meltdown risk period (residual heat dissipation) for the entire danger period _without_ electricity.
That said: Water cooled reactor vessels are intrinsically unsafe (water is a nasty corrosive solvent at high pressure + temp, steam explosions if allowed to vent to atmosphere are nasty and there are always radionuclides dissolved in the mix due to the corrosion mentioned earlier). Whoever thought it was a good idea to use liquid sodium as a coolant needs their head read. Molten lead is marginally safer but a lot harder to remove if it freezes and anything with a graphite core that can get exposed to atmosphere is problematic (sellafield and chernobyl fires)
Molten salt U233/Thorium reactors are the best bet I can think of and would be more so if the graphite matrix can be replaced with something else (this looks to have been cracked). They can't melt down, burn or leak (any leaks will freeze solid before going far) and they are able to burn 99% of what goes in, vs conventional uranium systems 2%. Nor do they need expensive and problematic uranium enrichment plants (operational cost of the USA civil enrichment program is classified information). What they're not good at is producing material for nuclear weapons, which is why the USA gave up on developing them in 1972.
If the transformer explosion had happened at a non-nuclear plant this wouldn't be headline news.
"We still have about 2-3 years before the direct exposure cases begin to become apparent."
The dangers of radiation exposure are vastly overstated by many groups who can profit form fearmongering.
Air crew routinely experience radiation levels higher than anything anyone around Fukushima received outside the plant buildings and they're not exactly dropping like flies or turning into radioactive mutant zombies.
The average smoker has a non-insignificant amount of Polonium-210 fizzing away in his/her lungs, yet after decades of exposure to it, less than half will develop cancers.
They're only disasters if people completely and utterly fuck things up.
As happened at chernobyl - and as happened in the aftermath of Fukishima when TEPCO management consistently interfered with engineering attempts to make things safe, coupled with japanese refusal to acknowledge they needed external help (There were offers from the USA to helicopter in generating equipment, from Okinawa, etc)
Even in the aftermath of Fukushima precisely zero people died (one crane operator onsite died in the earthquake) and a few people received minor radiation burns. The reactor can be left for 35-40 years and then cleaned up when the hottest cesium compounds have burned out (This cleanup is now happening at Three Mile Island)
Yes there are safer alternatives to PWR/BWR which we could and should be pursuing - but the safety record of all civil nuclear power(*) is compelling when compared to the thousands of deaths each year attributable to coal powered electricity generation.
(*) The big nuclear mess sites worldwide are all military. As was the Sellafield fire reactor (it was producing plutonium for bombs).
2 words which make pure hydrogen difficult: "Hydrogen embrittlement"
Additionally its hard (dangerous, expensive) to transport. There are a lot more hydrogen atoms in a litre of diesel than a litre of Liquid Hydrogen.
For transport fuels it's best to tack on carbon atoms because despite the efficiency losses it's still a better deal overall. VW/Audi have just demonstrated a fuel they claim was made that way using atmospheric CO2
"But at that point, why not just make biofuel instead"
Because we don't have enough arable land to make biofuels and eat at the same time.
The long-term way forward is almost certain to be nuclear for electricity _and_ fuel synthesis (providing both heat and electrolysed hydrogen for synthesis processes) and whilst light water reactors have an exemplary safety record (I'm not kidding, they really do, despite the doom and gloom over TMI/Fukushima/Chernoybl(*)) there are safer designs which have been proven in the past but dropped because they didn't easily produce bomb-grade plutonium(**) I'm talking about LFTRs which are currently the "great white hope" - with any luck they'll be commercialised by the 2020s
(*) Coal stations release more radioactivity from radium alone each year than several chernobyl events.
(**) The plutonium produced is almost entirely the "wrong" isotope which happens to be highly radioactive and kills bombs ("normal" plutonium isn't particularly radioactive). It's extremely hard to separate the 2 isotopes enough to make bomb-grade material and virtually impossible to do so without diverting so much of the reprocessing stream that electricity production would be crippled.
Slashdot Mirror
"A government run by economists"
That's the problem. They're run by unqualified, unexperienced hacks who play at economics and got the position because they greased the right palms during election campaigns.
There may be economists in the civil service but their advice is generally ignored in the chase for votes.
Oversee operations != Drive the train.
There's a lot to be said for automating trains.
Almost all crashes are caused by driver error and most of the rest are down to substandard maintenance with a vanishingly small number caused by odd things like signal failure due to lightning strikes.
A train which can keep an eye on where it's going AND record/report track conditions in realtime would significantly improve the current setup where inspection trains only run over a track at weekly/monthly intervals.
On the UK's Docklands light railway, there is no driver, merely a supervisor - whose job is to open/close the doors and tell the train it can start. They often sit up the front even though there's no need to, as passengers reportedly feel uncomfortable when they realise there's no human in charge. (Although having observed them I suspect it's more about self-justification than anything else)
"Weekend drives through the mountains, coastal roads and countryside? I'll take the wheel, thanks."
You might like to let the car drive. That way you can pay attention to all the scenery the passengers are cooing over instead of concentrating on not driving off the next hairpin bend.
"Technology obviously decreases the amount of work people can do"
Conversely technology frees people up to do other work. (Until personal services get robotised at any rate).
Self driving trains exist and have done for a long time, but they don't cope well with unexpected obstructions on the line (like, for example people jumping in front of them or trees being down). That's to be expected when they're powered by tech as ancient as a PDP11 (Seriously, every train on the UK Dockland light rail system has one on board)
Quite a bit of automotive automation might end up being fed back into rail automation.
Even a H2 engine emits carbon - almost all the H2 fuel currently produced comes from stripping methane.
Clean burning it is, clean to make it isn't.
There are only a few real ways of reducing net carbon emissions without killing off 90% of the global population and reverting to a sackcloth+ashes existence. Just about everything that's been done so far has been greenwash to try and put off making significant changes.
Civil transport is extremely safe.
Air cargo flying less so.
General aviation has a safety record on par with motorcycle riding.
Helicoptors, cropdusting, bush flying and others tend to be below that, with military flying coming dead last - which is one reason why military pilots are no longer the go-to guys for airlines - they tend to take risks and press on where a civilly trained pilot will call it quits and divert.
Allowing them to resign means they can keep their pensions.
The same thing happens in the United Kingdom and people are getting pretty sick of it. There may be legal reforms on the horizon though.
As for all the "there are plenty of good cops out there" - the answer is "not nearly enough of them. 'Good cops' who cover for bad cops are bad cops too"
"If you think the people who hire cops don't bother to check with previous employers and do Google searches on new applicants, you need your head examined."
It's quite clear that in a large number of cases this is exactly what doesn't happen.
The issue of forged or "duress" glowing references is pandemic, but compounded by privacy breach litigation against former employers who've warned someone off hiring someone when references are followed up.
This is why many former employers simply say "XYZ was employed from date A to date B", no matter what the actual employment history is and refuse to divulge anything more.
Police cameras only work well when there are _severe_ disciplinary penalties for failing to activate one, or selectively deactivating it.
I've lost track of the number of reports I've seen where cruiser dashcams failed to operate at inconvenient moments. This is why modern systems are tamper-resistant and that in turn is helping expose more bent cops.
"Unfortunately it also wouldn't hurt the cops responsible - it would hurt the insurance companies. Considering the severity ..."
The end result is that certain cops would find themselves uninsurable and therefore unemployable.
"There is no reason passenger lines can't go everywhere, too."
Economics.
The same reason that a bus is a great way of moving a lot of people, but a scheduled bus service is a lousy way of moving lots of people, except under very specific circumstances.
"99% of Brits do not have that kind of convenient access to a HSR station,"
Nor do they have that kind of convenient access to an airport.
Factoid:
In the time it takes me to leave my London doorstep, drive to the airport, check in, wait, fly to Paris, jump on a metro and get to my hotel, I could have been in the hotel for at least an hour had I taken the train - and it's a 100 minute commuter journey to the Eurostar station from my doorstep.
Even getting to Amsterdam by train takes the same time as flying and the train trip is significantly longer as it has to route around the north sea.
"Most high-speed lines require an entirely new right-of-way."
Which europeans are more than happy to allow.
I lived in Rotterdam when the TGV line went through. It was interesting to see it go in and more interesting to ride it.
"So it's actually 1600 square miles of solar panels, at an estimated cost of about $1T."
Which underscores that nuclear power is cheaper, especially if done right.
"Of course this did not include cover night and low-light times like cloudy days or when the sun is not 90 degrees to the panel"
Or take into account the 50% loss in capacity as the panels age - with newer generation low cost panels apparently having as low as a 6 year lifespan vs the 15-20 of older ones.
As for "ecosystems which would benefit from some shade" - they've been doing without it for thousands of years thankyouverymuch. Just because you think they might benefit doesn't mean that the organisms there will see it that way.
"Oh - someone thinks there isn't already networks in place or is thinking in terms of water with upstream and downstream pipes."
Or someone doesn't realise that grid distribution systems designed to handle a few large power sources and feedouts has trouble coping with uncontrolled, unreliable input from thousands of small sources with resultant net power flows _across_ the infrastructure instead of up/down it.
Redoing the geometry of the grid system to cope with the rapid, uncontrolled, undesigned rearrangement of energy sources is pretty much on par with starting over - and it's a cost which the "renewables" generators don't have to take into account because of their heavily subsidised feedin tarriffs.
If solar and wind were worthwhile then the big generators would be using it. In some cases they are but the smaller sites are mostly subsidy suckers, not power generators.
"The gotcha is in shutting down the reactor, which can take longer to bring up than a coal plant -- which takes 1/2 day instead of several days."
That depends on the reactor design.
The 7MW experiemntal MSR at Oak ridge was shut down every friday afternoon and brought up every monday morning because noone wanted to look after it over weekends.
MSRs can be throttled up/down so quickly that the need for conventional peaking plant is almost eliminated and they don't suffer from Xenon poisoning.
Once you've got a reactor that flexible, you no longer need solar/wind generators - or the backing plants needed to guarantee them (you could use a MSR as backing plant, but what's the point?)
"One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid."
Most modern designs have passive safety mechanisms. Positive action is not needed to lift control rods into place (they drop in) and cooling systems are gravity fed.
One of the critical design features of all recent-build plants is the ability to passively cool the reactor system for the entire meltdown risk period (residual heat dissipation) for the entire danger period _without_ electricity.
That said: Water cooled reactor vessels are intrinsically unsafe (water is a nasty corrosive solvent at high pressure + temp, steam explosions if allowed to vent to atmosphere are nasty and there are always radionuclides dissolved in the mix due to the corrosion mentioned earlier). Whoever thought it was a good idea to use liquid sodium as a coolant needs their head read. Molten lead is marginally safer but a lot harder to remove if it freezes and anything with a graphite core that can get exposed to atmosphere is problematic (sellafield and chernobyl fires)
Molten salt U233/Thorium reactors are the best bet I can think of and would be more so if the graphite matrix can be replaced with something else (this looks to have been cracked). They can't melt down, burn or leak (any leaks will freeze solid before going far) and they are able to burn 99% of what goes in, vs conventional uranium systems 2%. Nor do they need expensive and problematic uranium enrichment plants (operational cost of the USA civil enrichment program is classified information). What they're not good at is producing material for nuclear weapons, which is why the USA gave up on developing them in 1972.
If the transformer explosion had happened at a non-nuclear plant this wouldn't be headline news.
"We still have about 2-3 years before the direct exposure cases begin to become apparent."
The dangers of radiation exposure are vastly overstated by many groups who can profit form fearmongering.
Air crew routinely experience radiation levels higher than anything anyone around Fukushima received outside the plant buildings and they're not exactly dropping like flies or turning into radioactive mutant zombies.
The average smoker has a non-insignificant amount of Polonium-210 fizzing away in his/her lungs, yet after decades of exposure to it, less than half will develop cancers.
https://xkcd.com/radiation/
"Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion"
They're only disasters if people completely and utterly fuck things up.
As happened at chernobyl - and as happened in the aftermath of Fukishima when TEPCO management consistently interfered with engineering attempts to make things safe, coupled with japanese refusal to acknowledge they needed external help (There were offers from the USA to helicopter in generating equipment, from Okinawa, etc)
Even in the aftermath of Fukushima precisely zero people died (one crane operator onsite died in the earthquake) and a few people received minor radiation burns. The reactor can be left for 35-40 years and then cleaned up when the hottest cesium compounds have burned out (This cleanup is now happening at Three Mile Island)
Yes there are safer alternatives to PWR/BWR which we could and should be pursuing - but the safety record of all civil nuclear power(*) is compelling when compared to the thousands of deaths each year attributable to coal powered electricity generation.
(*) The big nuclear mess sites worldwide are all military. As was the Sellafield fire reactor (it was producing plutonium for bombs).
Not to mention that they won't pick up "slow earthquakes" such as the ones along the ring of fire.
http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Lea...
It's when these _stop_ happening you need to worry as it means pressure is building up.
Or in Valdivia in 1960
2 words which make pure hydrogen difficult: "Hydrogen embrittlement"
Additionally its hard (dangerous, expensive) to transport. There are a lot more hydrogen atoms in a litre of diesel than a litre of Liquid Hydrogen.
For transport fuels it's best to tack on carbon atoms because despite the efficiency losses it's still a better deal overall. VW/Audi have just demonstrated a fuel they claim was made that way using atmospheric CO2
"But at that point, why not just make biofuel instead"
Because we don't have enough arable land to make biofuels and eat at the same time.
The long-term way forward is almost certain to be nuclear for electricity _and_ fuel synthesis (providing both heat and electrolysed hydrogen for synthesis processes) and whilst light water reactors have an exemplary safety record (I'm not kidding, they really do, despite the doom and gloom over TMI/Fukushima/Chernoybl(*)) there are safer designs which have been proven in the past but dropped because they didn't easily produce bomb-grade plutonium(**) I'm talking about LFTRs which are currently the "great white hope" - with any luck they'll be commercialised by the 2020s
(*) Coal stations release more radioactivity from radium alone each year than several chernobyl events.
(**) The plutonium produced is almost entirely the "wrong" isotope which happens to be highly radioactive and kills bombs ("normal" plutonium isn't particularly radioactive). It's extremely hard to separate the 2 isotopes enough to make bomb-grade material and virtually impossible to do so without diverting so much of the reprocessing stream that electricity production would be crippled.